Do You Speak American?

This was a great book. It discussed the linguistics of the very different American dialects and changing trends in pronunciation. Even if you are not a linguistic. It is an excellent layman's introduction to the variety of language and dialect that permeates the United States. What people say, how they say it, and how others perceive them for doing so are all covered. The tendency of mainstream America to look down upon the speech of African Americans, immigrants, and other minorities is explored. This book is an excellent study on the language of Americans and how it changes in relation to the nation's history and cultural values. It answered some questions I had about the language. It is an insightful book on the evolution of the English language in America.

The Adventures of English

In this amazingly interesting book, Melvyn Bragg shows us the remarkable story of the English language from its modest beginnings around 500 A.D. as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its position today as a truly established global language. Along the way its colorful story takes in a host of characters, locations, and events, from the early Anglo-Saxon tribes; Alfred the Great's stubborn resistance to the Danes; the impact of the Norman invasion in 1066; the "arrival" of such masterpieces as Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, not to mention a "coarse" playwright named William Shakespeare (who alone contributed 2,000 new words to the language!); the songs of the Creole slaves and the words of Davy Crockett; and Lewis and Clark's expedition west, which coined hundreds of new terms as they discovered hitherto unknown flora and fauna. Embracing elements of Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, and Gullah, this 1,500-year story covers a huge range of countries and peoples. The Adventure of English is an enthralling story not only of power, religion, and trade but also of people and how they changed. And continue to change the extraordinary language that is English.

The Professor And The Madman

Author Simon Winchester does an excellent job in his book, The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, of portraying the details of the making of the OED. However, more than just a history of the dictionary, The Professor and The Madman is as its subtitle says, “a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.” The Professor and The Madman reads almost like a thriller crime novel. As Salon book reviewer, Charles Taylor points out,

If the initial sections of his tale have the appeal of a gaslight Victorian thriller, Winchester doesn't leave it at that. He's a superb historian because he's a superb storyteller. Nothing he includes here -- whether it's an examination of the section of London where Minor committed his crime, the genealogy of the two protagonists (usually the dullest part of any history or biography) or a brief history of the very notion of dictionaries -- feels like it's impeding his story. The strange richness of it all is enhanced by the flawless clarity of Winchester's prose. His Victorian style, far from being a pastiche or postmodernist game-playing, is his natural mode of expression.

Winchester successfully incorporates mystery, crime, murder, history, and even linguistics into his work all, as Taylor says, without interrupting the flow of his story. The book draws the reader in like a novel but includes all of the facts of a textbook in an interesting and informative way. While parts of the novel are undoubtedly added for narrative reasons, the hard facts are all correct and the story is interesting. The book would have been fascinating on its own, but it can tell us even more when examined in conjunction with the Oxford English Dictionary itself. Therefore, in this paper I will make a broad sweep of The Professor and the Madman, analyzing Winchester’s narrative devices and what they can tell us about the story of the OED. I will then turn to the OED itself and draw on specific examples to analyze how its unique structure allows its readers to get a full picture of the English language- what words mean, the intricate shades of meaning of every word, and how the dictionary presents the evolution of a word from its beginning, and predictions of how it may evolve in the future.

1066 The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth

Howarth’s book is a rather refreshing approach to history in that he does not attempt to feign the objectivity and transcendent stance that characterizes so many attempts at history and generally makes them rather unreadable at best, implausible at worst. Howarth feels little sympathy for the Normans and even less for William, who he refuses to even address by the appellation of Conqueror which history has foisted upon him. Instead, Howarth wears his loyalties and biases on his sleeve, and even opens the book with this rather remarkable explanation.
I find this particular approach to history as refreshing as it is honest. The notion that one can come at any period of history in a detached and objective manner is to completely miss the point of history. History is not merely a sequence of events, but is a tapestry of people filled with a wide variety of feelings, emotions, motives, desires, ignorance, and whatever else might characterize the human condition. History cannot merely be observed from a distance, because no one experiences any event in that way. To pretend to do so is to actually engage in a great fallacy, for it tries to make history something that it is not. In our experiences we have our biases, our ignorance, our responses to events and people that shape and color the way we view the world and the way we react to it. The notion that there can be a passion-less and detached approach to history strikes me as misguided and doomed to failure from the outset.
At any rate, Howarth’s writing style is superb. He weaves the narrative cleverly by means of using a sterotypical English village as a sort of foil for the progression of events and the common Englishman’s reaction to them. The village of Horstede is chosen to fulfill this role, as much for its generalized value as for its proximity to the author’s our home growing up.
Howarth begins with New Year’s Day of 1066 and moves through the year sequentially, dividing it up into convenient chucks of time to help the reader keep track of the various events as they progress. In the midst of the this narrative thread Howarth presents some brief biographies of some of the major players- Edward the Confessor, his successor King Harold, Duke William, etc.